50-gigapixel camera is straight out of science fiction

via futureoftech.msnbc.msn.com

While photographers marvel at the 20 or 30 megapixels captured by the latest cameras, researchers at Duke laugh quietly and return to their lab to continue work on a system that could capture 50 gigapixels at the touch of a button.

For comparison, if your average point-and-shoot picture was the size of a word on this page, a 50-gigapixel shot would be around the size of your entire screen.

Gigapixels aren't new in and of themselves, of course: Enormous photos of the Milky Way or Obama's inauguration are both effective demonstrations of the power of huge images. But generally these giant pictures are created by one camera that takes hundreds (or thousands) of shots, which are then fitted together after the fact. Not a problem if you're taking pictures of stars, but no good if you wanted to capture a flock of birds taking off.

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Welcome to the World of Gigapixel Photography

via gizmodo.com

If you feel that your pictures sometimes lack fine-grained detail, they probably do. At least, they do compared to photographs taken with a new supercamera developed at Duke University, which is capable of instantly acquiring images that pack in a staggering 960 million pixels.

The 93-kilo device—pictured below—stitches together images from 98 separate 14-megapixel sensors to create the images. While there have been other examples of gigapixel photography in the past, they have relied on panning a camera across a scene, sequentially recording images which are later stitched together. This device, however, captures all the images simultaneously.

The resulting images are so detailed that they can reveal a 3.8-centimeter-wide object from 1 kilometer away. The image above (click to see a bigger version) shows one of the camera's test shots of a traffic circle. The insets images are digitally magnified by a factor of 13 and show details from 15 meters to 93 meters away. The images provide a 120°-wide view, so look a little bit like the results you might expect to see from a fish-eye lens.

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